Congress’s climate skeptics could snarl GOP’s strategy

Republican strategists have laid out an aggressive game plan for seizing the high ground on energy during the August recess: talk about gas prices and jobs, jobs, jobs.

But some Republicans are straying from the script, spouting off instead about the Book of Genesis, claims about scientific conspiracies and arguments that the Earth is cooling. And they show no signs of stifling their skepticism — even at the risk of providing a stream of YouTube-worthy sound bites that play into Democrats’ own strategy, which includes painting the GOP as the anti-science party.

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Climate skeptics in Congress

The Republicans’ skeptic caucus includes Texas Rep. Joe Barton, a former House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman, who grabbed headlines in April when he called Noah’s flood “an example of climate change,” and California Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, who told POLITICO that the idea of manmade global warming is a “fraud” and a “big lie.” Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), former chairman of the Environment and Public Works panel, has famously called climate change the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” a phrase he used for the title of his book on the topic.

The skeptics don’t speak for all Republicans, but they complicate the task of GOP leaders who want voters to focus on their warnings that President Barack Obama’s climate proposals will wipe out jobs and raise energy prices. Meanwhile, Democrats — some of them eager to downplay the economic implications of Obama’s plans — are only too thrilled to swing the spotlight to a debate about science.

The pro-Obama group Organizing for Action has prepared for the August push by publishing an online database of dozens of Capitol Hill climate “deniers,” including House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Louisiana Sen. David Vitter, the top Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee. Boehner made the list for a 2009 interview in which he blamed carbon dioxide emissions partly on “every cow in the world, you know, when they do what they do.”

Keep those comments coming, Democrats and their allies say.

“Having Inhofe, Vitter, Boehner, et al., publicly denying the science in extreme terms can only help speed the long-term demographic and political changes that could make Republicans a minority party at the national level for a decade or more,” one well-known environmentalist said by email.

On the other hand, scoffing at climate science is popular enough with the party base that many congressional Republicans hesitate to openly challenge the skeptics. One longtime Republican operative explained that even GOP lawmakers’ most extreme statements about climate change “play well” among conservatives.

Still, some Republicans are sounding the alarm.

“It’s dawning on us that we’re going to lose people who are focused on the future — that would be young people — if we continue in this disputing of the science,” said former Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.), who wants his party to support a carbon tax as a more free-market alternative to Obama’s proposed regulations. “We’re going to lose credibility. We’re going to lose the sense that we have anything to offer.”

Republicans who don’t take climate change seriously risk losing support from women and young people, said former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, a Republican who headed the Environmental Protection Agency during George W. Bush’s first term. “The American people are beginning to make connections to the things that are happening around them.”

Some polls back up the warnings. A recent one issued by the League of Conservation Voters found that 73 percent of young voters — including 52 percent of young Republicans — would be less likely to support candidates who don’t want to address climate change. Asked to describe climate skeptics, respondents used terms like “ignorant,” “out of touch” and “crazy.”

Climate skepticism also threatens to hurt Republicans among Latinos, said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. He said Hispanics care more about climate change than any other group in the U.S.

Disputing climate science is “a successful individual strategy” for some Republicans in conservative districts, but “it’s a losing national strategy,” Leiserowitz said. “I think chances are they will pay a political price, increasingly so in the future.”

Of course, not all skeptics’ arguments sound alike. Some contend that the Earth isn’t warming, or at least not as fast as Obama would have voters believe — and some even claim it’s getting cooler. Others argue that the rising temperatures may not have human causes, or at least not significantly enough that we can do anything about them. Or they say scientists just don’t know.